Klaas Chielens joined the Institute for European Studies in 2009 in the role of Electronic Communication Officer. Although he has a background in linguistics, working as a researcher in this field for several years, he started a career in electronic media (as developer and project manager). Klaas holds a degree in linguistics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and followed several trainings on different subjects, ranging from OSX Sysadmin courses to Drupalcon participation.

Klaas' main involvement at the IES are between development and project-management, involved in several big projects such as the rebranding of the institute, the introduction of a new e-learning platform, the CORPUS project, for which he is the technical coordinator and several optimalisations of the IES online presence. Aside from this he is general point of information when questions rise about web 2.0 and other internet related subjects.

The few hours a day he is not working at the IES struggeling with css, php, html and other 'standards', he spends his time with his family, wife and two children or he works for his own company 'charcoal.be' where he struggles with ... css, php, html, mysql and other 'standards'. He is also involved in quite some organisations that take up way too much time. He is renown for having great difficulties to say 'no' when people ask him something.

I am currently working on a European platform for knowledge sharing between academia and policy makers in the field of sustainable consumption. The base of the platform is Drupal as well as Open Atrium. This is done in in the European FP7 program more specifically under the CORPUS Project.

• http://www.scp-knowledge.eu/

Next to that I'm involved in the remake of the IES website (of which you can already see the result now in the new layout and structure that we launched in november 2011). The website runs on Drupal and for 2012 I'll be working on an intranet structure for the IES as well as keeping this website up to date on the technical side of things.

Other duties: Library Server (KOHA) / Google Analytics / Online Marketing / php&mysql custom coding  etc...

• Francis Heylighen & Klaas Chielens: Evolution of Culture, Memetics. Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science 2009: 3205-3220
• Chielens K. & Heylighen F. (2005): Operationalization of Meme Selection Criteria: procedures to empirically test memetic hypotheses, Proceedings AISB 2005 .